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[PIN Submits] Taking action instead of just staying in motion! (12)

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Hey there!

I'm Claudio, a Brazilian guy living in Germany and 26 years old.

Background info:
Been studying industrial engineering and management for the past semesters, took a break to get started with affiliate marketing. For several months I was checking AM blogs, mostly from Charles Ngo and Malan Darras and always wanting to start. The excuse was always the same: I have to finish this first, then I can get started with AM. As you probably imagine, I never actually did get started. That was until I saw a post at Charles's blog about the STM London Meetup that was going to happen. That was in February 2015 and after sleeping for the night I decided it was time! On the next day I registered at STM, booked the flights and hostel and started reading about AM in this forum so I can at least understand what others are saying.
STM London was amazing, meeting a lot of people and seeing this industry is real. I think there are two big entry barriers for this industry: 1. Most people don't know it exists. They see the ads but don't spend a second thinking what is behind it. 2. Once you know about this industry, you probably think it is all bogus, a get rich quick scheme. STM London helped a lot in this regard, meeting people and talking to them. Also knowing that Jim Stark, someone I know personally, made it in AM helps in believing in this industry. And now it's my time!
So far it is going great, I'm keeping a routine which is working for me. It includes sleeping 7,5 to 8 hours every night and waking up around the same time everyday. Work at least 4 hours a day in pomodoro style, do some kind of exercise daily and read books at least two hours a day. I also made a simple spreadsheet where I keep track of my habits. Right now I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow and I already got some tips to use in AM besides the rest of the knowledge in there.

Why am I doing this?
I was spending most of my life going with the flow. Going to school and then university without thinking a lot about it and often choosing the path of less resistance. Recently, after seeing that my plans keep repeating themselves, without improvement (next [insert time/date] I will do [insert something to do better] better) and a lack of action, like my old plan for reading more books which didn't lead to reading more books, I decided It was time to take action. I had/have a problem of over-analyzing, analysis-paralysis, with fear of starting something and then later regretting it, thinking I should have started differently. But that is the wrong way to think about it, you should start right now and adjust on the way. A good analogy is flying a plane: 90%+ of the time it is not pointed to the destination, but rather just in the general direction and it keeps making adjustments on the way. A thread started by cmdeal, which said that staying in motion is not the same as taking action really hit home with me and now I'm here writing this.
My decision to go on with AM is based on a few things: I believe I have the skills to make it work. While I don't know how to design, use photoshop, code a landing page or similar yet, these are all skills which I'm eager to learn because they will be relevant to several other industries. Besides the hard skills, I have an easy time thinking like others think, understanding and seeing things as they see, which will prove valuable when coming up with angles. Also the desire to dictate my own future. In Drive by Daniel Pink, he states that what motivates us is a longing for autonomy, mastery and purpose, all of which I find in AM.
Let's go!

Starting AM:
Since coming back from London I had to spend a week making important life decisions, including where to live, moving back to Brazil or not, etc. I'll stay in Germany for now. I also set a limit of 14 days for gathering knowledge about AM before I start. In those 14 days I read and summarised:

• The Onboarding Zone
• Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing
• The Mobile Cookbook
• Charles's Blog
• Attila's Blog
• Finch's Blog
• Malan's Blog

That gave me a good foundation and enabled me to make a step-by-step plan to get my first campaign running.


It looks like a lot, and certainly will take more time doing it for the first time around. But what I like about it is that this is an easy guide to follow, with clear instructions on what to do next. I have each step more elaborated on my guide, which I will post here as I work on it.

Why post this follow along?
Pretty much everyone that is successful in AM has said the same things: stick to a vertical and a traffic source, join a mastermind and start a follow along. So for me it is a no-brainer, who am I to question that statements? I'll rather take the advices an follow them as long as viable for me and once I have more knowledge I can start tweaking things to fit me better.
I'm posting this follow along mainly for two things: to be able to write about my development and receive valuable feedback and also so others can read what I've done and apply it if they see it fit. Other newbies can see all the steps I took and reproduce them quite easily this way.

Mastermind:
I've joined a mastermind as well. Right now we are 6 people with a friend checking in to give some tips from time to time. We have weekly calls, shared DropBox to post creatives and most already have campaigns running. We started 3 weeks ago, people came from different backgrounds and all wanted to do either app installs or pin submits. We decided to go with pin submits, antivirus offers specifically. The last calls have been about the progress each has been doing and soon we will get into specifics, like dissecting a campaign, etc. If you have ideas on how to run a mastermind, feel free to share them.

Blogs following:
Blogs I'm following at the moment, using feedly: Charles Ngo, Attila, Finch, Malan, Unbounce, ConversionXL, Cal Newport, James Clear, Scott Young and Ryan Holiday.
If you have some good blogs to share, please do so!

Gameplan:
Traffic source: Mobile (specific traffic source to be defined)
Vertical: PIN submits (antivirus)
Geos: Tier 2 and 3 countries
Budget: 2~4k€

Short-term goals:

• Set a campaign live
• Get a conversion

Medium-term goals:

• Get to 0% ROI

Long-term goals:

• Make a living off of AM

Now I'll start posting on what I've been doing and questions I have will be at the end of the most recent post.

Action!

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Join affiliate networks:
Joined ClickDealer and MundoMedia because they both have offer for PIN submits and most in the mastermind have accounts at both.

Get a domain name:
Got two domains with Namecheap, one for tracking and one for a website.
I also got a different name server for the domains because of this guide, which states it would help me decrease click loss in mobile by decreasing response time. I know that fast loading times are very important for landing pages, didn't think changing name server would matter. I choose NSOne based on this report and zeno's tutorial.
Using this tool I can see the average response time for the tracking domain is 11ms.

Get CDN/VPS hosting:
I got a CDN at Rackspace. On STM the most recommended CDNs are Rackspace and CloudFront and after reading reviews and checking speeds on the internet I decided to go with Rackspace.
I also got a VPS, which in hindsight was probably not needed, at Beyond Hosting using this code.

This is what I've done so far, next is choosing an offer, etc as described on my list.

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Just subscribed to this one Claudio! Kick ass!

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All looking very good so far!

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Wow, most people on here have excellent intros and background info for their follow along campaign! Makes my thread post look so lazy!

Claudio, I love how strategic and methodical your game plan is on starting AM. As for me I'm jumping in head first and trying to learn things along the way. There's so much information through this forum that I felt would give me analysis paralysis if I keep reading. There's a popular quote from Bruce Lee - "If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done." So I'm trying to take immediate action and set new weekly goals / reviews.

Looking forward to your future guide post!

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Subscribed!

Awesome.... you know that there are probably so many affiliates (want to be affiliates) on this STM forum doing exactly what you described....almost to the "T".
...I am betting the majority are caught up learning and never doing and scared to spend the money not knowing if they will ever make profits or even stick with it. Some people may have a short attention spand and we talk ourselfs out of following through because it seems like way too much work for something that may not even be sustainable....anyway.....enough about me...haha

Sounds like you are on the right track! Good luck...keep posting!

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@Mr Green & caurmen: Thanks!

Hey ninjaspeed, there is a reason for spending some effort into making a nice follow along. It is like I'm selling my follow along here on the forum. It's in my interest that people find the info easily, find value in here, that it is easy to read. That makes people come back, give their input and we all are better off. If it is hard to read, to find the info and visually unappealing people might lose interest.

I can totally understand your decision of jumping right in, you are on the opposite side of the spectrum from me regarding that. Although in my opinion, some planning can save you a lot of headaches later on, but it is important to set some limits. I set myself a limit of 14 days for learning, then start implementing, registering at affiliate networks, etc.

MikroB, you are very right. It all boils down to action, doing instead of observing. Just like Nike's motto "Just do it."


Updates:

Since last post, I spent some time on some things. I had to format my pc, I attended a webinar from MobileAdScout that was run by Adsimilis. Some info I got from there is the flow Spy -> Research -> Test -> Tweak -> Repeat, that pops and redirects are good because of the amount of volume and fast testing and that the key things according to the presenter are traffic source, landing pages and offers.
I also tried to move my website from the VPS to Rackspace CDN, but that was more complicated than expected. Something like this that takes some people 5 minutes to do, took me over 3 hours of trying, reading, waiting and it is still not done. I will add a question at the bottom of this post about it.
Besides that, I finished reading Thinking, Fast and Slow and started reading The Power of Habit. Here I have read again about the influence that visualising your goals has, will work on that rather soon

Choose an offer:

My manager at ClickDealer sent me a list of antivirus offers running with the avCR%. These are the steps I did to choose an offer:

• Excluded offers from FR, not interested in low CR%, high cost and competitive offers yet.
• Excluded offer with avCR% under 2%
• After getting all the payouts from their website excluded those with payout under 0.50$ or over 3.00$
• This left me with offers in 12 geos, I picked Malaysia because the market is not so small like in other countries and there were 4 offers there.
• The offer I chose has a payout of 1.70$ and 7.30% avCR

After choosing an offer, I did some research about Malaysia:

• 30m inhabitants
• Language: Bahasa Melayu, with English being the second language
• 51% smartphone penetration
• 77% of the plans are prepaid, 23% postpaid
• 65% of the users are 17-26 years old, 21% 27-36
• 80% use Android, 13% iOS
• 47% use Maxis as their network, 39% DiGi, 13% Celcom
• 9m credit card holders

Brainstorm 10 angles:

As this is my first time coming up with angles, I reckon most/all of them will be known to everyone already.

• Protect your pictures
• Protect your credit card info
• Make your phone/apps launch faster
• Clean/get rid of virus/spyware
• Antivirus everyone is using
• Best antivirus for [phone model]
• Protect your phone from getting cloned
• Great against apps crashing
• Get faster/stable download/internet speed
• Get an antivirus that is up to date

Research the competition:

I signed up for a trial with WhatRunsWhere and later found out they don't support Malaysia.
After trying to cancel, I found at that I subscribed for the normal offer, even though I used the trial code. I emailed their support and said that was an error.
They sent me an email saying that that night they had problems with that and if I wish to cancel. Sent another email and am waiting for their answer.
Would suck to spend 150$ like that.
While I was there, I did look at some antivirus offers running in other geos.

Choose a traffic source:

After researching, the webinar and reading, there were five traffic sources I was interested in: ZeroPark, Go2Mobi, PopCash, AdCash and Propeller Ads.
I did some looking and sent them emails inquiring about their inventory in Malaysia and overall.
I'm waiting for some answers then I'll make a decision.


That's it for now, next I'll have to pick a traffic source, get tracking and start working on the creatives.



Question:
Can't move a website from a VPS to a CDN.
At NSOne, I have 2 records, both CNAMEs:
domain.com pointing to 065637867a9.r72.cf3.rackcdn.com/index.html (example)
www.domain.com pointing to 065637867a9.r72.cf3.rackcdn.com/index.html (example)
Yet when opening on the browser, if can't find the server.
If I insert http://065637867a9.r72.cf3.rackcdn.com/index.html at the address bar it works.
Does anyone have a clue about what might be wrong? I read zeno's DNS tutorial several times and couldn't find out what is wrong.

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CNAMEs shouldn't point to a page (065637867a9.r72.cf3.rackcdn.com/index.html), they should point to an existing domain name (065637867a9.r72.cf3.rackcdn.com).
You're creating an alias of a domain - not a link to a page.

After making changes, you also might need to give it an hour or two for DNS to propagate before the domain will resolve.

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Thanks for helping!
I made the changes, removed /index.html and waited for it to propagate. Now when I enter domain.com it opens a page that says resource not found, like when you try to open this link: 065637867a9.r72.cf3.rackcdn.com

Do you know what might be still wrong?

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Great, glad it's working!
I think that's just Rackspace's 404 page - do you actually have anything uploaded there (an index page or any directories)?

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Great follow-along

May I ask why you didn't mention Decisive in your traffic source decision? I chose decisive as a traffic source after reading the mobile cookbook appetiser guide. If you have done your research and decided not to use it, maybe I should do some reading up!

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@laurencestanley

There isn't a reason based on research to not pick Decisive. It's just that after talking to some people in London I haven't heard anything good nor bad about them. Besides that also fact that almost everyone that follows the cookbook to the letter will go to Decisive. Imo that can't create a healthy environment there, but I may be wrong and the impact might be negligible.



Also got the CDN working. After some PMs with stitch (thanks!), we found out that I just had to enable the website at RackSpace. This is why STM is great, people willing to help!

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